


Devotionals

by cruxifiction (vampirecaligula)



Category: Tales of Symphonia
Genre: Backstory, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Pre-Canon, Religious Conflict, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-10
Updated: 2016-03-10
Packaged: 2018-05-25 23:43:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,860
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6214900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vampirecaligula/pseuds/cruxifiction
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kratos was not meant to live a heretic's life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Devotionals

They told him the gods lived in temples.

A priest who was so tall his face could not be seen pointed at the relics on the altar, those carved from stone and wood and laid on a bright red cloth. Their power shapes the statues when they occupy their homes, he said, and they look down on us, blessing us in their glory.

Kratos closed one eye and then the other. The position of the statues changed each time—but, so did his toys back home, and they did not have anything particularly divine about them. Didn’t the gods have anything better to do than sit inside a relic all day, listening to prayers about test scores and marriage and the harvest?

They did, the priest assured him, and chuckled. But even the gods become tired, and when they are tired they like to have homes to return to. Giving them a beautiful place to stay is only the least we can do.

The temple was dark and smoky from incense; the walls and floor made of stone worn smooth from worshippers who thought the holy mana might stick to their skin. Tapestries woven from thick, dark strands hung on the walls. They trapped the air and made it hot; with no windows to speak of, it was difficult to breathe. At this time of day it did not matter so much, but when the hour of worship came around the room would be packed with fat and thin and old and young and it would be even more sweltering than it already was.

Kratos scratched his arm—his tunic was made of the same thick material as the tapestries, and itched awfully—and thought about what it might be like to make this temple his home.

Surely, he thought, the gods did not like it any more than he did.

* * *

 Kratos’s father worked in the high courts of Meltokio, doing who knew what with who knew whom—the details were never mentioned, and Kratos wouldn’t have been interested in hearing them, anyway. It was enough to know that the elder Aurion was gone before he woke and returned after he’d said his prayers and gone to bed, and that if he ever saw his father, it was probably because the man was displeased.

But there were times when even Aurion needed a break from the antics of society, and during these times they would leave the city to go south, where the weather was cooler and the sun liked to play hide-and-seek behind the mountains.

The foot of the hill held no proper temple to speak of, but there was a small chapel to the family’s patron gods and the Aurion ancestors, about whom Kratos knew only a little. Neither he nor his father spent much more time in it than was expected. Kratos preferred to be out on the mountain, chasing a rabbit or a stream and pretending to be knights with the boys from the village further away. (They all took turns being the dragon, though Kratos wasn’t very good at it. It didn’t make sense to him to terrorize the village when he could be exchanging goods and services with it instead.)

Other times Kratos would be alone, and he’d run out into a field of tall grass and lie down with the sun tingling on his skin. The grass rustled, an insect buzzing in his ear, the creek gurgled somewhere in the distance, and the wind tugged gently at his hair and clothes while carrying whispers on it of something far away. It would be pleasant to sleep, but it was more pleasant to close his eyes and ruminate on nothing, because moving or saying anything would ruin the whole experience. He suspected that if he were a god, he wouldn’t mind spending eternity here, where there was no one to bother him except the caterpillar on his finger.

It was certainly better than the temples back home.

* * *

For all their pomp and circumstance, the knights of Meltokio were still soldiers, and soldiers were deeply religious. The war with Sylvarant worsened by year and everyone knew that any day could be his last. Should worse come to worst, it was better to be at peace with as many of the gods as one could.

Even while he was a page, and then a squire, and then a knight, Kratos had fewer gods than many of his companions. Two or three, and the odd fourth if he had a very specific request; he didn’t think it was any more likely that having many gods would ensure his requests than having a few, and it was easier to devote time and energy if there were only the three to think about. Though he wouldn’t admit it to anyone, he felt that his relationship with the few he had chosen was all the more intimate for the time he was able to give them.

It was also fewer temples he had to attend.

Because he _did_ go to temple—they _were_ designated holy places, and it would be disrespectful to assume that because he didn’t like them, the gods didn’t either. Still, he preferred to linger outside and gaze at the stars, considering the beings that resided in the heavens or the ones that slept below the earth, and wonder if the current state of the world was really something that would please them.

For the priests complained that the gods had broken communion with Tethe’alla, and the holy districts of the city had been in uproar for months now. Sacrifices were made with increasing regularity and the price of incense had shot up. Kratos had heard that some areas had even begun sacrificing half-elves to the more bloodthirsty gods, but none of that was taking place in Meltokio, and he tried not to think about it. They weren’t his gods.

* * *

Kratos prayed for hours on end, but it did not save Martel.

He prayed to his gods and to his family’s gods and he prayed to the gods of elves and the gods of dwarves; he even prayed to the vague Sylvaranti gods Yuan had mentioned one time or another, whose names he wasn’t certain he was pronouncing right. Perhaps that was the problem. Perhaps in his desperation to find salvation for their friend he had spread his devotion too thin, and the gods had taken their revenge for his infidelity with her death. Why? he demanded of the trees, and the sky; what had she ever done to deserve such a fate? If the gods wanted to punish him then they were welcome to, and he would bear it with humility. There was no need to make Martel and Mithos and Yuan pay the price as well.

_There are no gods._

Yuan’s mouth curled into a snarl and the words were bitter, laced with the poison acolytes took to demonstrate their devotion. _And even if there were, they wouldn’t care for_ us _._

Any other time Kratos would have protested. Now, he couldn’t bring himself to consider it. Yuan was angry because he was grieving, and if he didn’t lash out then he would lock himself away, and that would be even worse.

Mithos repeated Yuan’s words—there are no gods—but with a faraway look in his eyes.

* * *

The separation of Tethe’alla and Sylvarant was devastating to both of the new worlds. One could hear the wailing of the inhabitants, Kratos suspected, from the top of the Tower of Salvation. The priests cried out that the gods had abandoned them, soldiers without leaders lost in a hostile land agreed, and there were too many dead over the thousand years to comprehend the loss.

The new worlds were rife with chaos and darkness, but in that darkness was the faintest light of hope: a new god, a god who understood what it was to live in misfortune and to suffer as the people suffered, a god who only wanted to care for the world and make it into a place full of light and love.

The Tome of Martel contained three books that Kratos ensured were spoken of in every city. The first book, which held the words of Martel as she had said them, and the second and third that Kratos and Mithos had written with their interpretations of what she had said. There would have been a fourth book, but Yuan had accused them of desecrating her memory, and said he wanted nothing to do with it. For Mithos, that was just as well.

Kratos wondered every so often if perhaps Yuan was right. Was it disrespectful to make Martel into one of the pantheon, as they were doing? Kratos could not believe it was so. Martel’s word contained something other gods never had, and her ideals were so good and true that he couldn’t imagine living according to them would ever bring harm. All they wanted was to ensure the world knew what had been sacrificed, and that Martel’s death had not been in vain.

* * *

Years became decades, and decades became centuries. Kratos’s gods were forgotten in Meltokio and the rest of the world; their temples fell into disruption and disrepair, and though Kratos had never liked them, there was a distinct hollow in his chest when he went back and saw stray dogs lying on the ragged, sacred tapestries.

“Martel’s is the true word,” Mithos said in defiance, head held high as he preached to new believers. “The old gods don’t matter anymore!”

 _Martel is not a goddess_ , Kratos wanted to say. _We made her one, but that’s not what she is_.

He tried to attend a service for Martel once or twice—how different the times were now, that her churches and cathedrals and mosques towered toward the sky, with room inside for hundreds and icons painted delicately on walls and windows. But it was too strange to hear her words parroted back to him in modern Sylvaranti, too disquieting to hear of Mithos the Hero’s endeavors and to think to himself, _that’s not how it was_. To see the people bend on their knees and ask Martel for guidance, for salvation, to believe that she would answer them. She wouldn’t have liked this, he thought. Martel was not there, nor was her spirit.

It called into question everything Kratos had once believed. It had been so easy, _too_ easy, to raise Martel’s pedestal higher than any that had come before. They should all have been struck down by the gods’ fury, left to rot in their sacrilege. But Kratos’s gods remained silent as a tomb on the matter of the new deity in their midst. With a heavy toll in his heart, be began to fear that like Martel, they had merely been created by heretics like himself thousands of years before.

* * *

“There are no gods,” Yuan said to him again, but this time his words were soft, as if he was telling Kratos about how low the sun hanged over Triet. “Never have been. That’s not my fault or your fault, or even Mithos’s fault. That’s just how it is, and you’re as stupid as the rest of them if you really believe they want to help you.”

Yuan spat on the ground and adjusted the weight of the blade on his back. The ancient desert city loomed before them, its lights blinking on as the stars appeared one after the other in the sky.

“I don’t believe they want to help,” Kratos murmured, but Yuan had already moved on.

* * *

He had not prayed in centuries on the day he prayed for Anna. Kratos was not sure he remembered how, as he fumbled through half-remembered proverbs and tripped over syllables dead for years.  

In the end, it didn’t matter. Anna died just as Martel had and took their son with her, and Kratos could not even find the bodies to give them a proper burial.

 _A proper burial? With what rites_? he demanded of himself, digging fingers into his scalp in an effort to slow his racing thoughts. _Into which god’s care would you send those you could not even protect yourself?_ Anna had believed firmly in Martel, and he had come so close to accepting that, but even Martel could not protect her followers from her closest companions.

He understood now why Mithos had turned Martel into a goddess. The prospect of losing Anna, of no one remembering her name or how she had spoken or what she had believed, of how strong she was in the face of her circumstances and how inspiring she had been, how loving—it was too much to think of. He would rather she was remembered as a more perfect version of herself than not at all.

Was that, then, what a god was?

A memory of someone who’d lived, but in such a way that reassured and inspired those who could never hope to be so righteous? Or was that merely a saint, such as the Chosens were supposed to be? Kratos did not know.

After that day, he resolved not to ask again.

* * *

“I don’t believe Martel exists.”

Kratos’s train of thought dissipated as the arrogant words caught his attention. The Tethe’allan Chosen came into focus. He stood on the other side of the room, but he effortlessly made himself heard, and did not deign to look at Kratos when he spoke.

What had they been talking about? Neither of them cared to discuss Martel more than occupation required; the Chosen’s mention of her now, away from the Holy Ground and Martel’s devoted, piqued his curiosity.

“Why not?” Kratos asked. He did not make himself heard. He didn’t need to.

The Chosen’s eyes narrowed. He loathed to be reminded that they were of one kind, with sharpened hearing blessing them both. He tucked a strand of curling red hair behind his ear as he twirled the hilt of his dagger around his hand. “Well, if she does,” he went on, with the brash heresy he was famous for, “she sure as hell doesn’t care about me.”    

The words were familiar. Someone had said much the same to him once, about something else. “Perhaps she’s indisposed,” Kratos replied, instead of smiting him like a proper angel should, “and would answer your prayers if she had the time.”

"It’s too late now. If she was going to answer, she should’ve done it long ago, and then maybe I wouldn’t have to be talking to you.”

 _You would have been talking to me at some point anyway_ , Kratos thought to himself with a kind of dark humor, but he did not say it aloud. Let the Chosen think the world revolved around himself. It would keep him from becoming shrewd.

“The Inquisitors could be on you in a moment, if you speak like that.”

“Oh, they’ve tried,” the Chosen assured him with a grin. “I got food poisoning from them once. But I’m still kicking, and they’re still plotting against me, so Martel can’t be too passionate about her holy cause.”

“Have you considered that it might be by her good will that you’re alive?”

“If I’m alive because of her, then her good will didn’t have shit to do with it.”

Kratos could not rightly disagree.

* * *

The day he had lost Anna, he had prayed to some god—to any god—that there would be some way she would survive. That somehow, through a stroke of good fortune, he would not be parted from her forever. His prayers were not answered then.

But it could not be coincidence that this boy was the same age as his son would have been; that he had his mother’s eyes and face and brown skin, that he carried the name they’d fought over for hours. That when he smiled, it was Anna smiling at him, and it was Anna’s fierceness that led him to forgo his senses and pledge to defend the Sylvaranti Chosen.

Kratos’s breath caught in his throat and he swore his heart stopped when he read Anna’s name, cut into the gravestone with a precision known only to dwarves. Nausea took root in his stomach when he saw Anna’s crystal embedded in Lloyd’s hand. And there was something else too—that something inside of himself had been filled that he hadn’t known was missing.

The tiny chapel in Iselia was dark and smoky with incense, the stones worn smooth from pilgrims who thought that holy mana might rub off on their skin. An icon of Martel sat on the altar, and the priests wore robes that were made under Spiritua’s guidelines, but if Kratos knelt and closed his eyes then he could pretend that the tapestry on the wall was one covered in ancient patterns, and that the chants in ancient Sylvaranti were in a language even older than himself. He could kneel there and murmur to himself uninterrupted—even if the gods did not exist, he thought, or if they weren’t what he thought they were, something had answered his prayers even after all these years, and perhaps that was worth something.

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this partly because kratos + his faith is so, so important to me, and partly because i really wanted to experiment with storytelling styles. i hope it worked as well as i wanted it to! 
> 
> thank you so much for reading!


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